I tend not to mention my birthday. Even writing this is breaking that general rule, but I do it to illustrate a point. You see, I’m cursed.

The ladies at work are big birthday people, and insist on making a huge fuss over birthdays, including mine and especially mine, since I protest it so much. I tell them it’s a curse, they tell me it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since I think it will be a bad day, it is. I doubt that. But I’ll let you be the judge:

The day itself went all right, though work was busy busy busy. Then I get home. Plans were to take a little nap and then be taken to dinner by my boys. So, phone in hand as I sit down on the bed, I land right in a huge, wet, smelly puddle. Now our dog,Lucy, is a good dog. But she has this bad habit of hopping up and sleeping on the bed, and she’s starting to get old, so you do the math. So much for my nap! Time to do some serious laundry, instead.

Okay, so that does not make a curse. I agree. Keep reading.

Dinner. We decided to go to our favorite Mexican restaurant since we’ve been having some disappointing restaurant meals of late, but that’s the place we can always count on. Except our waiter didn’t speak a single word of English. Not true! He could say, “Diet Coke,” pretty well. At any rate, he mucked up the order but good and the manager had to actually come over — twice — to get it right. (He came over on his own, by the way. No use thinking I’m some Prima Donna who throws a fit in a restaurant. We hadn’t even gotten our food yet when he came over the first time.) If that wasn’t enough, Son #3 suffered one of his infamous fits of nausea right before the food came. Now this can end one of three ways. A) We go to the bathroom, he gets over himself, and life goes on. B) He goes to the bathroom, loses it, gets better and life goes on. But he tends to prefer C) He goes to the bathroom, hems and haws for a while, whines a lot, decides he’s okay to come back to the table, then hurls all over the second he sits down. Lucky for everyone in a ten mile radius, tonight he chose option A. But you never know.

Still not enough to confirm the curse for you? Yeah. Keep going.

At the moment, it is 2:44 AM. Yes. AM. This from a girl who has an off switch set to “coma” at 10PM every night. Firetrucks have a way of waking a girl from a pretty hard sleep, though.

Firetruck #1 didn’t bug me much, though it woke me. Firetruck #2 was icing on the cake. But Firetruck #3 paired with the fireman cruising through my backyard got me up and out of the house.

As I approached the fireman to ask if I should get my kids the hell out o the house, the neighbor came over and confirmed what I figured: there was a gas leak next door. The firemen, though, didn’t seem too concerned. “It’s not on fire,” one said. Yeah. It wouldn’t be, until the spark that sends the whole place up to the International Space Station, but not before sending shards through Son #1’s bedroom.

At the moment, life is calming down over there. The power company came out and dealt with it all, I think. I came inside to write this blog, since I’m not going to be sleeping anytime soon. Oh, and I have an answer for those of you claiming that since it’s 2 AM it is no longer technically my birthday. The firemen said the gas looked to be leaking for about 6 hours. It’s the birthday curse by osmosis. Yes, the force is strong with me.

So I’m going to make sure everything is kosher and then attempt sleep. Don’t worry, folks, you should be safe. Until next September first, anyway.